Paper IV

Unit I

Romanticism: The French Revolution and After and Romantic Themes

1.1. Introduction

During the second half of the 18th century economic and social changes took place in
England. The country went through the so-called Industrial Revolution when new industries
sprang up and new processes were applied to the manufacture of traditional products. During the
reign of King George III (1760-1820) the face of England changed. The factories were built, the
industrial development was marked by an increase in the export of finished cloth rather than of
raw material, coal and iron industries developed. Internal communications were largely funded.
The population increased from 7 million to 14 million people. Much money was invested in
road- and canal-building. The first railway line which was launched in 1830 from Liverpool to
Manchester allowed many people inspired by poets of Romanticism to discover the beauty of
their own country. Just as we understand the tremendous energizing influence of Puritanism in
the matter of English liberty by remembering that the common people had begun to read, and
that their book was the bible, so we may understand this age of popular government by
remembering that the chief subject of romantic literature was the essential nobleness of common
men and the value of the individual.

As we read now that brief portion of history which lies between the Declaration of
Independence (1776) and the English Reform Bill of 1832, we are in the presence of such mighty
political upheavals that “the age of revolution” is the only name by which we can adequately
characterize it. Its great historic movements become intelligible only when we read what was
written in this period; for the French Revolution and the American Commonwealth, as well as
the establishment of a true democracy in England by the Reform Bill, were the inevitable results
of ideas which literature had spread rapidly through the civilized world. Liberty is fundamentally
an ideal; and that ideal—beautiful, inspiring, compelling—was kept steadily before men’s minds
by a multitude of books and pamphlets as far apart as Burn’s Poems and Thomas Paine’s Rights
of Man—all read eagerly by the common people, all proclaiming the dignity of common life, and
all uttering the same passionate cry against every form of class or caste oppression.

First the dream, the ideal in some human soul; then the written word which proclaims it,
and impresses other minds with its truth and beauty; then the united and determined effort of
men to make the dream a reality—that seems to be a fair estimate of the part that literature plays
in the political progress of a country.

Romanticism was the greatest literary movement in the period between 1770-1840. It
meant the shift of sensibility in art and literature and was based on interdependence of Man and
Nature. It was a style in European art, literature and music that emphasized the importance of
feeling, emotion and imagination rather than reason or thought. The Romantic Period of
literature came into being in direct reaction against a variety of ideas and historical happenings
taking place in England and Europe at that time. These happenings include the Napoleonic Wars
and their following painful economic downfalls; the union with Ireland: the political movement
known as Chartism, which helped to improve social recognition and conditions of the lower
classes: the passage of the Reform Bill which suppressed slavery in the British Colonies, curbed
monopolies, lessened poverty, liberalized marriage laws, and expanded educational facilities for
the lower classes, it both accepted and despised the current philosophy of utilitarianism, a view
in which the usefulness of everything, including the individual was based on how beneficial it
was to Society. Finally, the most important factor to impact a change in both thought and
literature was that of the Industrial Revolution. The Industrial Revolution brought about vast
changes in English society. It helped to create both great fortunes and great hardship. Within a
short time England went from being a country of small villages with independent craftsmen to a
country of huge factories run by sweat shops full of men, women, and children who lived in
overcrowded and dangerous city slums. An industrial England was being born in pain and
suffering. The presence of a developing democracy, the ugliness of the sudden growth of cities,
the prevalence of human pain, the obvious presence of the "profit motive" all helped to
characterize what was in many respects" the best of times...... the worst of times."

In England the Romantic authors were individuals with many contrary views. But all of
them were against immoral luxuries of the world, against injustice and inequality of the society,
against suffering and human selfishness.
 The period of Romanticism in England had its peculiarities. The Romantic writers of
England did not call themselves romanticists (like their French and German contemporaries).
Nevertheless, they all depicted the interdependence of Man and Nature. The Romantic writers
based their theories on the intuition and the wisdom of the heart. On the other hand, they were
violently stirred by the suffering of which they were the daily witnesses. They hoped to find a
way of changing the social order by their writing, they believed in literature being a sort of
Mission to be carried out in order to reach the wisdom of the Universe.

1.1.1 The Concept of Romanticism

Throughout history certain philosophies or ideas have helped to shape the themes of
literature, art, religion, and politics. The concept of Romanticism was preceded by the
philosophy of Neoclassicism. In the writings before this period humans were viewed as being
limited and imperfect. A sense of reverence for order, reason, and rules were focused upon.
There was distrust for innovation and invention. Society was encouraged to view itself as a group
with generic characteristics. The idea of individualism was looked upon with disfavor. People
were encouraged through literature, art, religion, and politics to follow the traditional rules of the
church and government. However, by the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries a great reaction
against this philosophy was noted. It was labeled as Romanticism.

The expression Romantic gained currency during its own time, roughly 1780-1850.
However, even within its own period of existence, few Romantics would have agreed on a
general meaning. Perhaps this tells us something. To speak of a Romantic era is to identify a
period in which certain ideas and attitudes arose, gained currency and in most areas of
intellectual endeavor, became dominant. That is, they became the dominant mode of expression.
Which tells us something else about the Romantics: expression was perhaps everything to them -
- expression in art, music, poetry, drama, literature and philosophy. Just the same, older ideas did
not simply wither away. Romantic ideas arose both as implicit and explicit criticisms of 18th
century Enlightenment thought. For the most part, these ideas were generated by a sense of
inadequacy with the dominant ideals of the Enlightenment and of the society that produced them.
 Thus, Romanticism was an artistic, literary, and intellectual movement that originated in
Europe toward the end of the 18th century and in most areas was at its peak in the approximate
period from 1800 to 1850. Partly a reaction to the Industrial Revolution, it was also a revolt
against the aristocratic social and political norms of the Age of Enlightenment and a reaction
against the scientific rationalization of nature. It was embodied most strongly in the visual arts,
music, and literature, but had a major impact on historiography, education and the natural
sciences. Its effect on politics was considerable and complex; while for much of the peak
Romantic period it was associated with liberalism and radicalism, its long-term effect on the
growth of nationalism was probably more significant.

The movement validated intense emotion as an authentic source of aesthetic experience,

placing new emphasis on such emotions as apprehension, horror and terror, and awe—especially
that which is experienced in confronting the sublimity of untamed nature and its picturesque
qualities: both new aesthetic categories. It elevated folk art and ancient custom to a noble status,
made spontaneity a desirable characteristic (as in the musical impromptu), and argued for a
natural epistemology of human activities, as conditioned by nature in the form of language and
customary usage. Romanticism reached beyond the rational and Classicist ideal models to raise a
revived medievalism and elements of art and narrative perceived to be authentically medieval in
an attempt to escape the confines of population growth, urban sprawl, and industrialism.
Romanticism embraced the exotic, the unfamiliar, and the distant, harnessing the power of the
imagination to envision and to escape.

1.2. Reaction Against Enlightenment

Romanticism appeared in conflict with the Enlightenment. You could go as far as to say
that Romanticism reflected a crisis in Enlightenment thought itself, a crisis which shook the
comfortable 18th century philosophe out of his intellectual single-mindedness. The Romantics
were conscious of their unique destiny. In fact, it was self-consciousness which appears as one of
the keys elements of Romanticism itself.
 The philosophes were too objective -- they chose to see human nature as something
uniform. The philosophes had also attacked the Church because it blocked human reason. The
Romantics attacked the Enlightenment because it blocked the free play of the emotions and
creativity. The philosophe had turned man into a soulless, thinking machine -- a robot. In a
comment typical of the Romantic thrust, William Hazlitt (1778-1830) asked, "For the better part
of my life all I did was think." And William Godwin (1756-1836), a contemporary of Hazlitt’s
asked, "what shall I do when I have read all the books?" Christianity had formed a matrix into
which medieval man situated himself. The Enlightenment replaced the Christian matrix with the
mechanical matrix of Newtonian natural philosophy. For the Romantic, the result was nothing
less than the demotion of the individual. Imagination, sensitivity, feelings, spontaneity and
freedom were stifled -- choked to death. Man must liberate himself from these intellectual
chains.

Like one of their intellectual fathers, Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), the Romantics
yearned to reclaim human freedom. Habits, values, rules and standards imposed by a civilization
grounded in reason and reason only had to be abandoned. "Man is born free and everywhere he
is in chains," Rousseau had written. Whereas the philosophes saw man in common that is, as
creatures endowed with Reason the Romantics saw diversity and uniqueness. That is, those traits
which set one man apart from another, and traits which set one nation apart from another.
Discover yourself -- express yourself, cried the Romantic artist. Play your own music, write your
own drama, paint your own personal vision, live, love and suffer in your own way. So instead of
the motto, "Sapere aude," "Dare to know!" the Romantics took up the battle cry, "Dare to be!"
The Romantics were rebels and they knew it. They dared to march to the tune of a different
drummer -- their own. The Romantics were passionate about their subjectivism, about their
tendency toward introspection. Rousseau’s autobiography, The Confessions (1781), began with
the following words:

I am commencing an undertaking, hitherto without precedent and which will never find an
imitator. I desire to set before my fellows the likeness of a man in all the truth of nature, and that
man myself. Myself alone! I know the feelings of my heart, and I know men. I am not made like
any of those I have seen. I venture to believe that I am not made like any of those who are in
existence. If I am not better, at least I am different.
 Romanticism was the new thought, the critical idea and the creative effort necessary to
cope with the old ways of confronting experience. The Romantic era can be considered as
indicative of an age of crisis. Even before 1789, it was believed that the ancien regime seemed
ready to collapse. Once the French Revolution entered its radical phase in August 1792, the fear
of political disaster also spread. King killing, Robespierre, the Reign of Terror, and the
Napoleonic armies all signaled chaos -- a chaos which would dominate European political and
cultural life for the next quarter of a century.

Meanwhile, the Industrial Revolution -- in full swing in England since the 1760s --
spread to the Continent in the 1820s, thus adding entirely new social concerns. The old order --
politics and the economy -- seemed to be falling apart and hence for many Romantics, raised the
threat of moral disaster as well. Men and women faced the need to build new systems of
discipline and order, or, at the very least, they had to reshape older systems. The era was prolific
in innovative ideas and new art forms. Older systems of thought had to come to terms with rapid
and apparently unmanageable change.

In the midst of what has been called the Romantic Era, an era often portrayed as devoted
to irrationality and "unreason," the most purely rational social science -- classical political
economy -- carried on the Enlightenment tradition. Enlightenment rationalism continued to be
expressed in the language of political and economic liberalism. For example, Jeremy Bentham’s
(1748-1832) radical critique of traditional politics became an active political movement known
as utilitarianism. And revolutionary Jacobinism inundated English Chartism -- an English
working class movement of the 1830s and 40s. The political left on the Continent as well as
many socialists, communists and anarchists also reflected their debt to the heritage of the
Enlightenment.

The Romantics defined the Enlightenment as something to which they were clearly
opposed. The philosophes oversimplified. But Enlightenment thought was and is not a simple
and clearly identifiable thing. In fact, what has often been identified as the Enlightenment bore
very little resemblance to reality. As successors to the Enlightenment, the Romantics were often
unfair in their appreciation of the 18th century. They failed to recognize just how much they
shared with the philosophes. In doing so, the Romantics were similar to Renaissance humanists
in that both failed to perceive the meaning and importance of the cultural period which had
preceded their own. The humanists, in fact, invented a "middle age" so as to define themselves
more carefully. As a result, the humanists enhanced their own self-evaluation and prestige in
their own eyes. The humanists foisted an error on subsequent generations of thinkers. Their error
lay in their evaluation of the past as well as in their simple failure to apprehend or even show a
remote interest in the cultural heritage of the medieval world. Both aspects of the error are
important.

With the Romantics, it shows first how men make an identity for themselves by defining
an enemy, making clear what they oppose, thus making life into a battle. Second, it is evident
that factual, accurate, subtle understanding makes the enemy mere men. Even before 1789, the
Romantics opposed the superficiality of the conventions of an artificial, urban and aristocratic
society. They blurred distinctions between its decadent, fashionable Christianity or unemotional
Deism and the irreligion or anti-clericalism of the philosophes. The philosophes, expert in
defining themselves in conflict with their enemy -- the Church -- helped to create the mythical
ungodly Enlightenment many Romantics so clearly opposed.

It was during the French Revolution and for fifty or sixty years afterward that the
Romantics clarified their opposition to the Enlightenment. This opposition was based on equal
measures of truth and fiction. The Romantics rejected what they thought the philosophes
represented. And over time, the Romantics came to oppose and criticize not only the
Enlightenment, but also ideas derived from it and the men who were influenced by it.

The period from 1793 to 1815 was a period of European war. War, yes, but also
revolutionary combat -- partisanship seemed normal. Increasingly, however, the Romantics
rejected those aspects of the French Revolution -- the Terror and Napoleon -- which seemed to
them to have sprung from the heads of the philosophes themselves. For instance, William
Wordsworth (1770-1850) was living in Paris during the heady days of 1789 -- he was, at the
time, only 19 years old. In his autobiographical poem, The Prelude, he reveals his experience of
the first days of the Revolution. Wordsworth read his poem to Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-
1834) in 1805--I might add that The Prelude is epic in proportion as it weighs in at eight
thousand lines. By 1805, the bliss that carried Wordsworth and Coleridge in the 1790s, had all
but vanished.
 But for some Romantics, aristocrats, revolutionary armies, natural rights and
constitutionalism were not real enemies. There were new enemies on the horizon, especially after
the Congress of Vienna (1814-1815). The Romantics concentrated their attack on the
heartlessness of bourgeois liberalism as well as the nature of urban industrial society. Industrial
society brought new problems: soulless individualism, economic egoism, utilitarianism,
materialism and the cash nexus. Industrial society came under attack by new critics: the utopian
socialists and communists. But there were also men like Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881) and
Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) who identified the threat of egoism as the chief danger of their
times. Egoism dominated the bourgeoisie, especially in France and in England. Higher virtues
and social concerns were subsumed by the cash nexus and crass materialism of an industrial
capitalist society. Artists and intellectuals attacked the philistinism of the bourgeoisie for their
lack of taste and their lack of an higher morality. Ironically, the brunt of their attack fell on the
social class which had produced the generation of Romantics.

Romanticism reveals the persistence of Enlightenment thought, the Romantic’s definition

of themselves and a gradual awareness of a new enemy. The shift to a new enemy reminds us
that the Romantic Age was also an eclectic age. The Enlightenment was no monolithic structure -
- neither was Romanticism, however we define it. Ideas of an age seldom exist as total systems.
Our labels too easily let us forget that past ideas from the context in which new ideas are
developed and expressed. Intellectuals do manage to innovate and their innovations are
oftentimes not always recombinations of what they have embraced in their education. Intellectual
and geographic contexts differ from state to state -- even though French culture seemed to have
dominated the Continent during the early decades of the 19th century. England is the obvious
exception. Germany is another example -- the movement known as Sturm und Drang (Storm and
Stress) -- was an independent cultural development.

National variations were enhanced when, under the direct effect of the Napoleonic wars,
boundaries were closed and the easy international interchange of ideas was inhibited. But war
was not the only element that contributed to the somewhat inhibited flow of ideas. Profound
antagonism and the desire to create autonomous cultures was also partially responsible. This
itself grew out of newly found nationalist ideologies which were indeed characteristic of
Romanticism itself. And within each nation state, institutional and social differences provided
limits to the general assimilation of a clearly defined set of ideas. In France, for example, the
academies were strong and during the Napoleonic era, censorship was common. Artists and
intellectuals alike were prevented from innovating or adopting new ideas. In Germany, on the
other hand, things were quite different. The social structure, the heavy academism and specific
institutional traits blocked any possibility of learning or expressing new modes of thought.

Most important were the progressive changes in the potential audience artists and
intellectuals now faced -- most of them now had to depend upon that audience. Where the
audience was very small, as in Austria and parts of Germany, the results often ranged between
the extremes of great openness to rigid conservatism. Where the audience was steadily growing,
as in France or England, and where urbanization and the growth of a middle class was
transforming the expectations of the artist and intellectual, there was room for experiment,
innovation and oftentimes, disastrous failure. Here, artists and intellectuals could no longer
depend upon aristocratic patronage. Popularity among the new and powerful middle class
audience became a rite of passage.

At the same time, intellectuals criticized the tasteless and unreceptive philistine
bourgeoisie. Ironically, they were criticizing the same class and the same mentality from which
they themselves had emerged and which had supported them. In this respect, the Romantic age
was similar to the age of Enlightenment. A free press and careers open to talent provided
possibilities of competitive innovation. This led to new efforts to literally train audiences to be
receptive to the productions of artists and intellectuals. Meanwhile, literary hacks and Grub
Street writers produced popular pot boilers for the masses. All these characteristics placed limits
upon the activities of the Romantics. These limits could not be ignored. In fact, these limits often
exerted pressures that can be identified as causes of the Romantic movement itself.

There were direct, immediate and forceful events that many British and European
Romantics experienced in their youth. The French Revolution was a universal phenomenon that
affected them all. And the Napoleonic wars after 1799 also influenced an entire generation of
European writers, composers and artists. Those who were in their youth in the 1790s felt a chasm
dividing them from an earlier, pre-revolutionary generation. Those who had seen Napoleon
seemed different and felt different from those who were simply too young to understand. The
difference lay in a great discrepancy in the quality of their experience. Great European events,
such as the Revolution and Napoleon, gave identity to generations and made them feel as one -- a
shared experience. As a consequence, the qualities of thought and behavior in 1790 was
drastically different from what it was in 1820. In the Romantic era, men and women felt these
temporal and experiential differences consciously and intensely. It is obvious, I suppose, that
only after Napoleon could the cults of the hero, of hero worship and of the genius take full form.
And only after 1815 could youth complain that their time no longer offered opportunities for
heroism or greatness -- only their predecessors had known these opportunities.

The intellectual historian or historian of ideas always faces problems. Questions of

meaning, interpretation and an acceptance of a particular Zeitgeist, or climate of opinion or world
view is serious but difficult stuff. Although we frequently use words like Enlightenment or
Romanticism to describe intellectual or perhaps cultural events, these expressions sometimes
cause more harm than good. There is, for instance, no 18th century document, no perfect
exemplar or ideal type, to use Max Weber’s word, which can be called "enlightened." There is,
unfortunately, no perfect document or ideal type of which we may pronounce, "this is
Romantic."

We have seen that one way to define the Romantics is to distinguish them from the
philosophes. But, for both the philosophes and the Romantics, Nature was accepted as a general
standard. Nature was natural -- and this supplied standards for beauty and for morality. The
Enlightenment’s appreciation of Nature was, of course, derived wholly from Isaac Newton. The
physical world was orderly, explicable, regular, logical. It was, as we are all now convinced, a
Nature subject to laws which could be expressed with mathematical certainty. Universal truths --
like natural rights -- were the object of science and of philosophy. And the uniformity of Nature
permitted a knowledge which was rapidly accumulating as a consequence of man’s rational
capacity and the use of science to penetrate the mysteries of nature. The Enlightenment defined
knowledge in a Lockian manner--that is, a knowledge based on sense impressions. This was an
environmentalist psychology, if you will, a psychology in which men know only what their sense
impressions allowed their faculty of reason to understand.

The Enlightenment was rationalist -- it glorified human reason. Reason illustrated the
power of analysis -- Reason was the power of associating like experiences in order to generalize
about them inductively. Reason was a common human possession -- it was held by all men. Even
American "savages" were endowed with reason, hence the 18th century emphasis on "common
sense," and the "noble savage." Common sense -- revealed by reason -- would admit a
groundwork for a common morality. As nature was studied in order to discover its universal
aspects, men began to accept that what was most worth knowing and what was therefore most
valuable, was what they had in common with one another. Society, then, became an object of
science. Society revealed self-evident truths about human nature -- self-evident truths about
natural rights.

Social and political thought was individualistic and atomistic. As the physical universe
was ultimately machinelike, so social organization could be fashioned after the machine. Science
pronounced what society ought to become in view of man’s natural needs. These needs were not
being fulfilled by the past -- for this reason, the medieval matrix and the ancien regime inhibited
man’s progress. The desire was to shape institutions, to change men and to produce a better
society -- knowledge, morality and human happiness. The intention was at once cosmopolitan
and humanitarian.

The Romantics felt all the opinions of the Enlightenment were fraught with dangerous
errors and oversimplifications. Romanticism may then be considered as a critique of the
inadequacies of what it held to be Enlightened thought. The critique of the Romantics --
sometime open, sometimes hidden -- can be seen as a new study of the bases or knowledge and
of the whole scientific enterprise. It rejected a science based on physics -- physics was
inadequate to describe the reality of experience. "O for a life of sensations rather than of
thoughts," wrote John Keats (1795-1821). And William Blake (1757-1827) admonished us all to
"Bathe in the waters of life." And Keats again, "Beauty is truth, truth beauty, -- that is all/Ye
know on earth, and all ye need to know."

The Romantic universe was expanding, evolving, becoming -- it was organic, it was
alive. The Romantics sought their soul in the science of life, not the science of celestial
mechanics. They moved from planets to plants. The experience was positively exhilarating,
explosive and liberating -- liberation from the soulless, materialistic, thinking mechanism that
was man. The 18th century had created it. The Romantics found it oppressive , hence the focus
on liberation. Listen to the way Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) put it in Prometheus
Unbound:
 The joy, the triumph, the delight, the madness!
The boundless, overflowing, bursting gladness,
The vaporous exultation not to be confined!
Ha! Ha! The animation of delight
Which wraps me, like an atmosphere of light,
And bears me as a cloud is borne by its own wind.

The Romantics returned God to Nature -- the age revived the unseen world, the
supernatural, the mysterious, the world of medieval man. It is no accident that the first gothic
novel appears early in the Romantic Age. Nature came to be viewed historically. The world was
developing, it was a world of continuous process, it was a world in the process of becoming. And
this continuous organic process could only be understood through historical thought. And here
we have come almost full circle to the views expressed by Giambattista Vico a century earlier.
This is perhaps the single most revolutionary aspect of the Romantic Age. An admiration for all
the potency and diversity of living nature superseded a concern for the discovery of its universal
traits. In a word, the Romantics embraced relativism. They did not seek universal abstract laws
as Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) had. Instead, they saw history as a process of unfolding, a
becoming. Was not this the upshot of what G. W. F. Hegel (1770-1831) had argued in his
philosophy of history? And look at the time frame: Kant - 1780s, Hegel - 1820s and 30s.

The Romantics sought Nature’s glorious diversity of detail -- especially its moral and
emotional relation to mankind. On this score, the Romantics criticized the 18th century. The
philosophe was cold, mechanical, logical and unfeeling. There was no warmth in the heart. For
the Romantics, warmth of heart was found and indeed enhanced by a communion with Nature.
The heart has reasons that Reason is not equipped to understand. The heart was a source of
knowledge -- the location of ideas "felt" as sensations rather than thoughts. Intuition was equated
with that which men feel strongly. Men could learn by experiment or by logical process—but
men could learn more in intuitive flashes and feelings, by learning to trust their instincts. The
Romantics distrusted calculation and stressed the limitations of scientific knowledge. The
rationality of science fails to apprehend the variety and fullness of reality. Rational analysis
destroys the naïve experience of the stream of sensations and in this violation, leads men into
error.
 One power possessed by the Romantic, a power distinct and superior to reason, was
imagination. Imagination might apprehend immediate reality and create in accordance with it.
And the belief that the uncultured—that is, the primitive -- know not merely differently but best
is an example of how the Romantics reinterpreted the irrational aspect of reality -- the
Imagination. The Romantics did not merely say that there were irrational ways of intuiting
reality. They rejected materialism and utilitarianism as types of personal behavior and as
philosophies. They sought regeneration -- a regeneration we can liken to that of the medieval
heretic or saint. They favored selfless enthusiasm, an enthusiasm which was an expression of
faith and not as the product of utilitarian calculation. Emotion -- unbridled emotion -- was
celebrated irrespective of its consequences.

The 18th century life of mind was incomplete. The Romantics opted for a life of the
heart. Their relativism made them appreciative of diversity in man and in nature. There are no
universal laws. There are certainly no laws which would explain man.
The philosophe congratulated himself for helping to destroy the ancien regime. And today, we
can perhaps say, "good job!" But after all the destruction, after the ancient idols fell, and after the
dust had cleared, there remained nothing to take its place. In stepped the Romantics who sought
to restore the organic quality of the past, especially the medieval past, the past so detested by the
pompous, powdered-wig philosophe.

Truth and beauty were human attributes. A truth and beauty which emanated from the
poet’s soul and the artist’s heart. If the poets are, as Shelley wrote in 1821, the "unacknowledged
legislator’s of the world," it was world of fantasy, intuition, instinct and emotion. It was a human
world.

1.2.2 Industrial Revolution

The Industrial Revolution of the late 18th and early 19th centuries was revolutionary
because it changed -- revolutionized -- the productive capacity of England, Europe and United
States. But the revolution was something more than just new machines, smoke-belching
factories, increased productivity and an increased standard of living. It was a revolution which
transformed English, European, and American society down to its very roots. Like the
Reformation or the French Revolution, no one was left unaffected. Everyone was touched in one
way or another -- peasant and noble, parent and child, artisan and captain of industry. The
Industrial Revolution serves as a key to the origins of modern Western society. As Harold Perkin
has observed, "the Industrial Revolution was no mere sequence of changes in industrial
techniques and production, but a social revolution with social causes as well as profound social
effects" [The Origins of Modern English Society, 1780-1880 (1969)].

The INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION can be said to have made the European working-
class. It made the European middle-class as well. In the wake of the Revolution, new social
relationships appeared. As Ben Franklin once said, "time is money." Man no longer treated men
as men, but as a commodity which could be bought and sold on the open market. This
"commodification" of man is what bothered Karl Marx -- his solution was to transcend the profit
motive by social revolution.

There is no denying the fact that the Industrial Revolution began in England sometime
after the middle of the 18th century. England was the "First Industrial Nation." As one economic
historian commented in the 1960s, it was England which first executed "the takeoff into self-
sustained growth." And by 1850, England had become an economic titan. Its goal was to supply
two-thirds of the globe with cotton spun, dyed, and woven in the industrial centers of northern
England. England proudly proclaimed itself to be the "Workshop of the World," a position that
country held until the end of the 19th century when Germany, Japan and United States overtook
it.

More than the greatest gains of the Renaissance, the Reformation, Scientific Revolution
or Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution implied that man now had not only the opportunity
and the knowledge but the physical means to completely subdue nature. No other revolution in
modern times can be said to have accomplished so much in so little time. The Industrial
Revolution attempted to effect man's mastery over nature. This was an old vision, a vision with a
history. In the 17th century, the English statesman and "Father of Modern Science, Francis
Bacon (1561-1626), believed that natural philosophy (what we call science) could be applied to
the solution of practical problems, and so, the idea of modern technology was born. For Bacon,
the problem was this: how could man enjoy perfect freedom if he had to constantly labor to
supply the necessities of existence? His answer was clear -- machines. These labor saving
devices would liberate mankind, they would save labor which then could be utilized elsewhere.
"Knowledge is power," said Bacon, and scientific knowledge reveals power over nature.

The vision was all-important. It was optimistic and progressive. Man was going
somewhere, his life has direction. This vision is part of the general attitude known as the idea of
progress, that is, that the history of human society is a history of progress, forever forward,
forever upward. This attitude is implicit throughout the Enlightenment and was made reality
during the French and Industrial Revolutions. With relatively few exceptions, the philosophes of
the 18th century embraced this idea of man's progress with an intensity I think unmatched in our
own century. Human happiness, improved morality, an increase in knowledge were now within
man's reach. This was indeed the message, the vision, of Adam Smith, Denis Diderot, Voltaire,
Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin.

Engines and machines, the glorious products of science began to revolutionize the idea of
progress itself. If a simple machine can do the work of twenty men in a quarter of the time
formerly required, then could the New Jerusalem be far behind? When you view the Industrial
Revolution alongside the democratic revolutions of 1776 and 1789, we cannot help but be struck
by the optimism so generated. Heaven on Earth seemed reality and no one was untouched by the
prospects. But, as we will soon see, while the Industrial Revolution brought its blessings, there
was also much misery. Revolutions, political or otherwise, are always mixed blessings. If we can
thank the Industrial Revolution for giving us fluoride, internal combustion engines, and laser
guided radial arm saws, we can also damn it for the effect it has had on social relationships. We
live in the legacy of the Industrial Revolution, the legacy of the "cash nexus," as the mid-19th
century Scottish critic Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) put it, where the only connection between
men is the one of money, profit and gain.

The origins of the Industrial Revolution in England are complex and varied and, like the
French Revolution, the Industrial Revolution is still a subject of a vast historical debate over
origins, developments, growth and end results. This debate has raged among historians since at
least 1884, when Arnold Toynbee (1852-1883), an English historian and social reformer,
published the short book, Lectures on the Industrial Revolution in England. Toynbee was in a
fairly good position to assess the revolution in industry -- England had, by the 1880s, endured
more than a century of industrialization.

The Industrial Revolution refers to a series of significant shifts in traditional practices of

agriculture, manufacturing, and transportation, as well as the development of new mechanical
technologies that took place between the late 18th and 19th centuries in much of the Western
world. During this time, the United Kingdom, as well as the rest of Europe and the United States
soon after, underwent drastic socio-economic and cultural changes during this time. These
changes in part gave rise to the English Romantic spirit, especially in the United Kingdom.
During the late 18th century, the United Kingdom’s economic system of manual and animal
based labor shifted toward a system of machine manufacturing while more readily navigable
roads, canals, and railroads for trade began to develop. Steam power underpinned the dramatic
increase in production capacity, as did the rather sudden development of metal tools and
complex machines for manufacturing purposes.

The Industrial Revolution had a profound effect upon society in the United Kingdom. It
gave rise to the working and middle classes and allowed them to overcome the long-standing
economic oppression that they had endured for centuries beneath the gentry and nobility.
However, while employment opportunities increased for common working people throughout the
country and members of the middle class were able to become business owners more easily, the
conditions workers often labored under were brutal. Further, many of them were barely able to
live off of the wages they earned. During this time, the industrial factory was created (which, in
turn, gave rise to the modern city). Conditions within these factories were often dirty and, by
today’s standards, unethical: children were frequently used and abused for labor purposes and
long hours were required for work. A group of people in the United Kingdom known as the
Luddites felt that industrialization was ultimately inhumane and took to protesting and
sometimes sabotaging industrial machines and factories. While industrialization led to incredible
technological developments throughout the Western world, many historians now argue that
industrialization also caused severe reductions in living standards for workers both within the
United Kingdom and throughout the rest of the industrialized Western world. However, the new
middle and working classes that industrialism had established led to urbanization throughout
industrial cultures, drastic population increases, and the introduction of a relatively new
economic system known as capitalism.

The Romantic Movement developed in the United Kingdom in the wake of, and in some
measure as a response to, the Industrial Revolution. Many English intellectuals and artists in the
early 19th century considered industrialism inhumane and unnatural and revolted—sometimes
quite violently—against what they felt to be the increasingly inhumane and unnatural
mechanization of modern life. Poets such as Lord Byron (particular in his addresses to the House
of Lords) and William Blake (most notably in his poem “The Chimney Sweeper”) spoke out—
and wrote extensively about—the psychological and social affects of the newly industrial world
upon the individual and felt rampant industrialization to be entirely counter to the human spirit
and intrinsic rights of men. Many English Romantic intellectuals and artists felt that the modern
industrial world was harsh and deadening to the senses and spirit and called for a return, both in
life and in spirit, to the emotional and natural, as well as the ideals of the pre-industrial past.

Aided by revolutions in agriculture, transportation, communications and technology,

England was able to become the "first industrial nation." This is a fact that historians have long
recognized. However, there were a few other less-tangible reasons which we must consider.
These are perhaps cultural reasons. Although the industrial revolution was clearly an unplanned
and spontaneous event, it never would have been "made" had there not been men who wanted
such a thing to occur. There must have been men who saw opportunities not only for advances in
technology, but also the profits those advances might create. Which brings us to one very crucial
cultural attribute -- the English, like the Dutch of the same period, were a very commercial
people. They saw little problem with making money, nor with taking their surplus and
reinvesting it. Whether this attribute has something to do with their "Protestant work ethic," as
Max Weber put it, or with a specifically English trait is debatable, but the fact remains that
English entrepreneurs had a much wider scope of activities than did their Continental
counterparts at the same time.
1.3 French Revolution and English Literature

1.3.1 Introduction

The French Revolution is widely recognized as one of the most influential events of late
eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Europe, with far reaching consequences in political,
cultural, social, and literary arenas. Although scholars such as Jeremy Popkin point to more
concrete political issues as grounds for the upheaval, supporters of the Revolution rallied around
more abstract concepts of freedom and equality, such as resistance to the King’s totalitarian
authority as well as the economic and legal privileges given to the nobility and clergy. It is in this
resistance to monarchy, religion, and social difference that Enlightenment ideals of equality,
citizenship, and human rights were manifested. These beliefs had profound influence on the
Romantic poets.

The Revolution affected first- and second-generation Romantics in different ways. First-
generation poets such as William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Robert Southey,
the most well-known members of the “Lake District” school of poetry, initially sympathized with
the philosophical and political principles of the Revolution, particularly as expressed by William
Godwin in his Inquiry into Political Justice (1793). Wordsworth famously chronicled his
response to the war in his Prelude, although the relevant passages were not published in full until
after his death in 1850. One shorter section, however, made its way into print in 1809 under the
title “French Revolution, as it Appeared to Enthusiasts at Its Commencement.” The phrasing of
the title indicates Wordsworth’s turn toward more conservative politics later in life, particularly
after the bloody turn of the revolution.

According to Simon Bainbridge, Wordsworth and Coleridge translated the Revolution’s

emphasis on man’s equality into the “language of the common man” and “low” subject matter
found in Lyrical Ballads. Wordsworth’s everyday language and subject choices look like a
literary revolution that mirrors the historical revolution by breaking down the boundaries that
separated poetry - with its elevated characters, plots, and diction - from ordinary representation.

While first-generation Romantics saw their revolutionary fervor tempered by the

gruesome turn of the revolution from the execution of Louis XVI through the Reign of Terror,
second-generation Romantics such as Lord Byron and Percy Shelley held to the Revolution’s
principles in a more idealistic, if somewhat cautious way. Shelley, for instance, portrays
rebellious events in poems such as Prometheus Unbound (1820), Swellfoot the Tyrant (1820),
and Hellas (1822), yet he avoids direct representation of revolutionary action through a
mythological framework. This framework, according to Jeffrey Cox, serves a two-fold purpose:
to avoid the appearance of promoting violent revolutionary action and instilling despair in those
who still promoted the cause of liberty throughout Europe. The latter Shelley sees as the primary
fault with Wordsworth’s abandonment of radical libertarian ideals and adoption of more passive
solutions, while the former is characteristic of Shelley’s critique of Byron’s representations of
revolution as deteriorating into predestined violence and despondency. Shelley, above all, sought
to promote the ideals of liberty and equality through non-violent revolution. Furthermore, Cox
argues that Byron’s portrayal of inevitable, cyclical patterns of violence is representative of an
inability to break free of the past. In this way, Cox interprets the revolution in Marino Faliero as
doomed by the hero’s inability to overcome the past, which leads the rebels to mimic the actions
of the aristocracy which they are trying to overthrow. This cynical view of radical action is
reflective of Byron’s own attitudes toward the French Revolution, particularly his youthful
idolization of Napoleon Bonaparte, whom he later criticized for regressing from liberty and
democracy into monarchical dictatorship.

1.3.2 Origins

The French Revolution, along with the Industrial Revolution, has probably done more
than any other revolution to shape the modern world. Not only did it transform Europe
politically, but also, thanks to Europe's industries and overseas empires, the French Revolution's
ideas of liberalism and nationalism have permeated nearly every revolution across the globe
since 1945. In addition to the intense human suffering as described above, its origins have deep
historic and geographic roots, providing the need, means, and justification for building the
absolute monarchy of the Bourbon Dynasty which eventually helped trigger the revolution.
 The need for absolute monarchy came partly from France's continental position in the
midst of hostile powers. The Hundred Years War (1337-1453) and then the series of wars with
the Hapsburg powers to the south, east, and north (c.1500-1659) provided a powerful impetus to
build a strong centralized state. Likewise, the French wars of Religion (1562-98) underscored
the need for a strong monarchy to safeguard the public peace. The means for building a
monarchy largely came from the rise of towns and a rich middle class. They provided French
kings with the funds to maintain professional armies and bureaucracies that could establish
tighter control over France. Justification for absolute monarchy was based on the medieval
custom of anointing new kings with oil to signify God's favor. This was the basis for the
doctrine of Divine Right of Kings. In the late 1600's, all these factors contributed to the rise of
absolutism in France.

Louis XIV (1643-1715) is especially associated with the absolute monarchy, and he did
make France the most emulated and feared state in Europe, but at a price. Louis' wars and
extravagant court at Versailles bled France white and left it heavily in debt. Louis' successors,
Louis XV (1715-74) and Louis XVI (1774-89), were weak disinterested rulers who merely added
to France's problems through their neglect. Their reigns saw rising corruption and three
ruinously expensive wars that plunged France further into debt and ruined its reputation. Along
with debt, the monarchy's weakened condition led to two other problems: the spread of
revolutionary ideas and the resurgence of the power of the nobles.

Although the French kings were supposedly absolute rulers, they rarely had the will to
censor the philosophes' new ideas on liberty and democracy. Besides, in the spirit of the
Enlightenment, they were supposedly "enlightened despots" who should tolerate, if not actually
believe, the philosophes' ideas. As a result, the ideas of Voltaire, Rousseau, and Montesquieu on
liberty and democracy spread through educated society.

Second, France saw a resurgence of the power of the nobles who still held the top offices
and were trying to revive and expand old feudal privileges. By this time most French peasants
were free and as many as 30% owned their own land, but they still owed such feudal dues and
services as the corvee (forced labor on local roads and bridges) and captaineries (the right of
nobles to hunt in the peasants' fields, regardless of the damage they did to the crops). Naturally,
these infuriated the peasants. The middle class likewise resented their inferior social position,
but were also jealous of the nobles and eagerly bought noble titles from the king who was always
in need of quick cash. This diverted money from the business sector to much less productive
pursuits and contributed to economic stagnation.

Besides the Royal debt, France also had economic problems emanating from two main
sources. First of all, while the French middle class was sinking its money into empty noble titles,
the English middle class was investing in new business and technology. For example, by the
French Revolution, England had 200 waterframes, an advanced kind of waterwheel. France,
with three times the population of England, had only eight. The result was the Industrial
Revolution in England, which flooded French markets with cheap British goods, causing
business failures and unemployment in France. Second, a combination of the unfair tax load on
the peasants (which stifled initiative to produce more), outdated agricultural techniques, and bad
weather led to a series of famines and food shortages in the 1780's.

All these factors (intellectual dissent, an outdated and unjust feudal social order, and a
stagnant economy) created growing dissent and reached a breaking point in 1789. It was then
that Louis XVI called the Estates General for the first time since 1614. What he wanted was
more taxes. What he got was revolution.

1.3.3 Poetry and Politics

The conditions prevailing in England at that time made her particularly receptive to the
new ideas generated by the Revolution. In literature the French Revolution was instrumental in
the creation of a new interest in nature and the elemental simplicities of life. It accelerated the
approach of the romantic era and the close of the Augustan school of poetry which was already
moribund in the age of Wordsworth.

The age of Wordsworth was an age of revolution in the field of poetry as well as of
politics. In both these fields the age had started expressing its impatience of set formulas and
traditions, the tyranny of rules and the bondage of convention. From the French Revolution the
age imbibed a spirit of revolt asserting the dignity of the individual spirit and hollowness of the
time-honoured conventions which kept it in check. Thus both in the political and the poetic fields
the age learnt from the Revolution the necessity of emancipation-in the political field, from
tyranny and social oppression; and in the poetic, from the bondage of rules and authority. The
French Revolution, in a word, exerted a democratising influence, both on politics and poetry.
Inspired by the French Revolution, poets and politicians alike were poised for an onslaught on
old, time-rusted values. It was only here and there that some conservative critics stuck to their
guns and eyed all zeal for change and liberation with suspicion and distrust. (Thus, for instance,
Lord Jeffrey wrote in the Edinburgh Review that poetry had something common with religion in
that its standards had been fixed long ago by certain inspired writers whose authority it would be
ever unlawful to question.) But such views did not represent the spirit of the age which had come
under the liberating influence of the French Revolution.

It is perhaps quite relevant to point out here the folly of the belief that the new literary
and political tendencies, which had a common origin and were almost contemporaneous with
each other, always influenced a given person equally strongly, that a person could not be a
revolutionary in politics without being a revolutionary in literature, and vice versa. Scott, for
example, was a romantic, but a Tory. Hazlitt, on the contrary, was a chartist in politics but was
pleased to call himself an “aristocrat” in literature. Keats did not bother about the French
Revolution, or even politics, at all. Wordsworth and Coleridge, the two real pioneers of the
Romantic Movement in England, started as radicals and ended as tenacious Tories.

1.3.3. The Three Phases of the French Revolution

It is wrong to think of the French Revolution as a sudden coup unrelated to what had
gone before it. In fact, the seeds of the Revolution had been sown long before they sprouted in
1789. We can distinguish three clear phases of the French Revolution, which according to
Compton-Rickett, are as follows:

1. The Doctrinaire phase-the age of Rousseau;

2. The Political phase-the age of Robespierre and Danton;
3. The Military phase-the age of Napoleon.”

All these three phases considerably influenced the Romantic Movement in England.
1.3.4. Influence of the Doctrinaire Phase

The doctrinaire phase of the French Revolution was dominated by the thinker Rousseau.
His teachings and philosophic doctrines were the germs that brought about an intellectual and
literary revolution all over England. He was, fundamentally considered, a naturalist who gave the
slogan “Return to Nature.” He expressed his faith in the elemental simplicities of life and his
distrust of the sophistication of civilisation which, according to him, had been curbing the natural
(and good) man. He revived the cult of the “noble savage” untainted by the so-called culture.
Social institutions were all condemned by him as so many chains. He raised his powerful voice
against social and political tyranny and exhorted the downtrodden people to rise for
emancipation from virtual slavery and almost hereditary poverty imposed upon them by an
unnatural political system which benefitted only a few. Rousseau’s primitivism, sentimentalism,
and individualism had their influence on English thought and literature. In France they prepared
the climate for the Revolution.

Rousseau’s sentimental belief in the essential goodness of natural man and the
excellence of simplicity and even ignorance found a ready echo in Blake and, later, Wordsworth
and Coleridge. The love of nature and the simplicities of village life and unsophisticated folk
found ample expression in their poetic works. Wordsworth’s love of nature was partly due to
Rousseau’s influence. Rousseau’s intellectual influence touched first Godwin and, through him,
Shelley. Godwin inPolitical Justice embodied a considerable part of Rousseauistic thought. Like
him he raised his voice for justice and equality and expressed his belief in the essential goodness
of man. Referring reverently to Political Justice Shelley wrote that he had learnt “all that was
valuable in knowledge and virtue from that book.”

1.3.5. The Influence of the Political Phase and the Military Phase

The political phase of the Revolution, which started with the fall of the Bastille, sent a
wave of thrill to every young heart in Europe. Wordsworth became crazy for joy, and along with
him, Southey and Coleridge caught the general contagion. All of them expressed themselves in
pulsating words. But such enthusiasm and rapture were not destined to continue for long. The
Reign of Terror and the emergence of Napoleon as an undisputed tyrant dashed the enthusiasm
of romantic poets to pieces. The beginning of the war between France and England completed
their disillusionment, and Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey, who had started as wild radicals,
ended as well-domesticated Tories. The latter romantics dubbed them as renegades who had let
down the cause of the Revolution. Wordsworth, in particular, had to suffer much criticism down
to the days of Robert Browning who wrote a pejorative poem on him describing him as “the lost
leader.”

The modern era has unfolded in the shadow of the French Revolution. French society
itself underwent a transformation as feudal, aristocratic, and religious privileges disappeared and
old ideas about tradition and hierarchy were abruptly overthrown under the mantra of "Liberté,
égalité, fraternité". Globally, the Revolution accelerated the rise of republics and democracies,
the spread of liberalism, nationalism, socialism and secularism, the development of modern
political ideologies, and the practice of total war. Some of its central documents, like the
Declaration of the Rights of Man, expanded the arena of human rights to include women and
slaves.

1.4. Literary Characteristics of the Age

Literature was the first branch of art to be influenced by the waves of Romanticism, although the
concepts remain the same in all the art forms. It is one of the curiosities of literary history that
the strongholds of the Romantic Movement were England and Germany, not the countries of the
romance languages themselves. Thus it is from the historians of English and German literature
that we inherit the convenient set of terminal dates for the Romantic period, beginning in 1798,
the year of the first edition of Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge and of the
composition of Hymns to the Night by Novalis, and ending in 1832, the year which marked the
deaths of both Sir Walter Scott and Goethe. However, as an international movement affecting all
the arts, Romanticism begins at least in the 1770's and continues into the second half of the
nineteenth century, later for American literature than for European, and later in some of the arts,
like music and painting, than in literature. This extended chronological spectrum (1770-1870)
also permits recognition as Romantic the poetry of Robert Burns and William Blake in England,
the early writings of Goethe and Schiller in Germany, and the great period of influence for
Rousseau's writings throughout Europe.

The early Romantic period thus coincides with what is often called the "age of revolutions"--
including, of course, the American (1776) and the French (1789) revolutions--an age of
upheavals in political, economic, and social traditions, the age which witnessed the initial
transformations of the Industrial Revolution. A revolutionary energy was also at the core of
Romanticism, which quite consciously set out to transform not only the theory and practice of
poetry (and all art), but the very way we perceive the world. Some of its major precepts are as
follows:

1. Imagination: The imagination was elevated to a position as the supreme faculty of the
mind. This contrasted distinctly with the traditional arguments for the supremacy of
reason. The Romantics tended to define and to present the imagination as our ultimate
"shaping" or creative power, the approximate human equivalent of the creative powers of
nature or even deity. It is dynamic, an active, rather than passive power, with many
functions. Imagination is the primary faculty for creating all art. On a broader scale, it is
also the faculty that helps humans to constitute reality, for (as Wordsworth suggested),
we not only perceive the world around us, but also in part create it. Uniting both reason
and feeling (Coleridge described it with the paradoxical phrase, "intellectual intuition"),
imagination is extolled as the ultimate synthesizing faculty, enabling humans to reconcile
differences and opposites in the world of appearance. The reconciliation of opposites is a
central ideal for the Romantics. Finally, imagination is inextricably bound up with the
other two major concepts, for it is presumed to be the faculty which enables us to "read"
nature as a system of symbols.

2. Nature: The Romantics greatly emphasized the importance of nature and the primal
feelings of awe, apprehension and horror felt by man on approaching the sublimeness of
it. This was mainly because of the industrial revolution, which had shifted life from the
peaceful, serene countryside towards the chaotic cities, transforming man's natural order.
 Nature was not only appreciated for its visual beauty, but also revered for its ability to
help the urban man find his true identity. While particular perspectives with regard to
nature varied considerably--nature as a healing power, nature as a source of subject and
image, nature as a refuge from the artificial constructs of civilization, including artificial
language--the prevailing views accorded nature the status of an organically unified
whole. It was viewed as "organic," rather than, as in the scientific or rationalist view, as a
system of "mechanical" laws, for Romanticism displaced the rationalist view of the
universe as a machine (e.g., the deistic image of a clock) with the analogue of an
"organic" image, a living tree or mankind itself. At the same time, Romantics gave
greater attention both to describing natural phenomena accurately and to capturing
"sensuous nuance"--and this is as true of Romantic landscape painting as of Romantic
nature poetry. Accuracy of observation, however, was not sought for its own sake.
Romantic nature poetry is essentially a poetry of meditation.

3. Symbolism and Myth: Symbolism and myth were given great prominence in the
Romantic conception of art. In the Romantic view, symbols were the human aesthetic
correlatives of nature's emblematic language. They were valued too because they could
simultaneously suggest many things, and were thus thought superior to the one-to-one
communications of allegory. Partly, it may have been the desire to express the
"inexpressible"--the infinite--through the available resources of language that led to
symbol at one level and myth (as symbolic narrative) at another.

4. Emotion v/s Rationality: Consequently, the Romantics sought to define their goals
through systematic contrast with the norms of "Versailles neoclassicism." In their critical
manifestoes--the 1800 "Preface" to Lyrical Ballads, the critical studies of the Schlegel
brothers in Germany, the later statements of Victor Hugo in France, and of Hawthorne,
Poe, and Whitman in the United States--they self-consciously asserted their differences
from the previous age (the literary "ancien regime"), and declared their freedom from the
mechanical "rules." Certain special features of Romanticism may still be highlighted by
this contrast. We have already noted two major differences: the replacement of reason by
the imagination for primary place among the human faculties and the shift from a
 mimetic to an expressive orientation for poetry, and indeed all literature. In addition,
neoclassicism had prescribed for art the idea that the general or universal characteristics
of human behavior were more suitable subject matter than the peculiarly individual
manifestations of human activity. From at least the opening statement of
Rousseau's Confessions, first published in 1781--"I am not made like anyone I have seen;
I dare believe that I am not made like anyone in existence. If I am not superior, at least I
am different."--this view was challenged. Unlike the age of Enlightenment, which
focused on rationality and intellect, Romanticism placed human emotions, feelings,
instinct and intuition above everything else. While the poets in the era of rationality
adhered to the prevalent rules and regulations while selecting a subject and writing about
it, the Romantic writers trusted their emotions and feelings to create poetry. This belief
can be confirmed from the definition of poetry by William Wordsworth, where he says
that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings. The emphasis on emotions
also spread to the music created in that period, and can be observed in the compositions
made by musicians like Weber, Beethoven, Schumann, etc. Beethoven played an
important role in the transition of Western music from the classical to the Romantic age.

5. Artist, the Creator: As the Romantic period emphasized on human emotions, the
position of the artist or the poet also gained supremacy. In the earlier times, the artist was
seen as a person who imitated the external world through his art. However, this definition
was mooted in the Romantic era and the poet or the painter was seen as a creator of
something which reflected his individuality and emotions. The Romantic perception of
the artist as the creator is best encapsulated by Caspar David Friedrich, who remarked
that "the artist's feeling is his law". It was also the first time that the poems written in the
first person were being accepted, as the poetic persona became one with the voice of the
poet.

6. Nationalism: The Romantics borrowed heavily from the folklore and the popular local
art. During the earlier eras, literature and art were considered to belong to the high-class
educated people, and the lower classes were not considered fit to enjoy them. Also, the
language used in these works used to be highly lyrical, which was totally different from
 what was spoken by people. However, Romantic artists took no shame from being
influenced by the folklore that had been created by the masses or the common people,
and not by the literary works that were popular only among the higher echelons of the
society. Apart from poetry, adopting folk tunes and ballads was one of the very important
characteristics of Romantic music. As the Romantics became interested and focused upon
developing the folklore, culture, language, customs and traditions of their own country,
they developed a sense of Nationalism which reflected in their works. Also, the language
used in Romantic poems was simple and easy to understand by the masses.

7. The Everyday and the Exotic: The attitude of many of the Romantics to the everyday,
social world around them was complex. It is true that they advanced certain realistic
techniques, such as the use of "local color" (through down-to-earth characters, like
Wordsworth's rustics, or through everyday language, as in Emily Bronte's northern
dialects or Whitman's colloquialisms, or through popular literary forms, such as folk
narratives). Yet social realism was usually subordinate to imaginative suggestion, and
what was most important were the ideals suggested by the above examples, simplicity
perhaps, or innocence. Earlier, the 18th-century cult of the noble savage had promoted
similar ideals, but now artists often turned for their symbols to domestic rather than
exotic sources--to folk legends and older, "unsophisticated" art forms, such as the ballad,
to contemporary country folk who used "the language of common men," not an artificial
"poetic diction," and to children (for the first time presented as individuals, and often
idealized as sources of greater wisdom than adults).

Simultaneously, as opposed to everyday subjects, various forms of the exotic in time

and/or place also gained favor, for the Romantics were also fascinated with realms of
existence that were, by definition, prior to or opposed to the ordered conceptions of
"objective" reason. Often, both the everyday and the exotic appeared together in
paradoxical combinations. In the Lyrical Ballads, for example, Wordsworth and
Coleridge agreed to divide their labors according to two subject areas, the natural and the
supernatural: Wordsworth would try to exhibit the novelty in what was all too familiar,
while Coleridge would try to show in the supernatural what was psychologically real,
both aiming to dislodge vision from the "lethargy of custom." The concept of the
 beautiful soul in an ugly body, as characterized in Victor Hugo's Hunchback of Notre
Dame and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, is another variant of the paradoxical
combination.

8. Supernatural: Another characteristic of this movement is the belief in the supernatural.

The Romantics were interested in the supernatural and included it in their works. Gothic
fiction emerged as a branch of Romanticism after Horace Walpole's 1764 novel The
Castle of Otranto. This fascination for the mysterious and the unreal also led to the
development of Gothic romance, which became popular during this period. Supernatural
elements can also be seen in Coleridge's Kubla Khan', The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
and Keats' La Belle Dame Sans Merci. As no Romantic artist followed any strict set of
rules or regulations, it is difficult to define the characteristics of this movement
accurately. Nevertheless, some of these characteristics are reflected in the works of that
period. Though many writers and critics have called this movement "irrational", it cannot
be denied that it was an honest attempt to portray the world, especially the intricacies of
the human nature, in a paradigm-shifting way.

1.5. Poets of the Romantic Age

1.5.1. William Wordsworth

William Wordsworth (1770-1850) brought a completely new approach to the

writing of English poetry. His objections to an over-stylized poetic diction, his attitude to
nature, his choice of simple incidents and humble people as the subjects of his poetry—
these well known characteristics of his, are all but, minor aspects of his revolutionary
achievements. No, earlier English poet, had held such a view, nor in spite of
Wordsworth’s undoubted influence on later poetry, any subsequent poet, has held it in its
purity. Thus, Wordsworth is unique in the history of English poetry.

In 1791 he graduated from Cambridge, and traveled abroad to France. The spirit
of the French Revolution had strongly influenced Wordsworth, and he returned (1792) to
England, imbued with the principles of Rousseau and Republicanism. In 1793, were
published, “An Evening Walk” and “Descriptive Sketches”, written in a stylized idiom
and vocabulary of the 18th century. The outbreak of the Reign of Terror, prevented
Wordsworth’s return to France, and after gaining several small legacies, he settled with
his sister, Dorothy in Dorsetshire.

In Dorsetshire Wordsworth became an intimate friend with Samuel Taylor

Coleridge, and together they wrote the Lyrical Ballads (1798), where they sought to use
the language of ordinary people in poetry; it includes Wordsworth’s poem Tintern Abbey.
The work introduced Romanticism into England and became a manifesto for Romantic
poets. In 1800, the second edition of the Lyrical Ballads was published, which included
the critical essay outlining Wordsworth’s poetic principles. In its Preface, Wordsworth
describes poetry as the “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.”

The Prelude, his long autobiographical poem, was completed in 1805, but was not
published until his death. His next collection: Poems in two volumes (1807) include the
famous, “Ode to Duty” and the “Ode: Intimations of Immortality”, and few other sonnets.

Wordsworth’s personality and poetry were deeply influenced by his love of

nature, especially of the sights and scenes of the Lake District, where he spent the mature
part of his life. A profoundly, original and sincere thinker, Wordsworth displayed a high
seriousness comparable, at times, to Milton’s but tempered with tenderness and love of
simplicity.

Wordsworth’s earlier works show the poetic beauty of common place things and
people in works like “Margaret”, “Peter Bell”, “Michael”, and “The Idiot Boy”. His other
well known poems are, “Lucy”, “The Solitary Reaper”, “Daffodils”, “The Rainbow”,
“Resolution and Independence”, and the sonnet, “The World is Too Much with Us”.

Though his use of ordinary speech was highly criticized but it helped to get rid of
the artificial conventions in poetry of the 18th century diction. Wordsworth—the
profound, original and sincere thinker, is considered to be the greatest of English poets,
but above all, he would be remembered as the creator of a new poetic tradition.
1.5.2. Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Coleridge (1772-1834), an English poet and a Man of Letters, was the most influential,
brilliant and versatile figure, of the Romantic Movement in English literature.

Although Coleridge had been busy and productive in writing both poetry and topical
prose, it was not until his friendship with Wordsworth, that he wrote his best poems. In 1798,
Wordsworth and Coleridge published the volume Lyrical Ballads, whose poems and Preface
have made it a seminal work and a manifesto of the Romantic Movement in English literature.

Coleridge’s main contribution to the volume was the haunting, dream-like ballad, The
Rime of the Ancient Mariner. This long poem was well as Kubla Khan and Christabel, written
during the same period are two of his best known works. The three works make use of exotic
images and supernatural themes. Dejection: An Ode, published in 1802, is the last of Coleridge’s
great poems. It shows the influence of (or the affinity to) Wordsworth’s poetic ideals, notably,
the meditation upon self, nature, and the relationship among emotion, sense, experience and
understanding. His confessions of an Enquiring Spirit was published posthumously in 1840.

His shorter poems include Youth and Age, Fears in Solitude, Work without Hope, etc.
Coleridge worked for many years on his Biographia Literaria (1817), containing accounts of his
literary life, and critical essays on philosophical and literary subjects. It presents Coleridge’s
theories of creative imagination, but its debt to other writers, notably the German idealist
philosophers, is often so heavy that the line between legitimate borrowing and plagiarism is
blurred. This borrowing tendency, evident in some of his poetry, together with Coleridge’s
notorious inability to complete projects, and his suggestions of impractical ones, made him a
problematic figure. His most profound work is the philosophical Aids to Reflection.

Coleridge’s lifelong friend, Charles Lamb called him a “damaged Archangel”. Indeed,
20th century editorial scholarship has unearthed additional evidence of plagiarism, thus Coleridge
is still a controversial figure. However, the originality and beauty of his poems, and his
enormous influence on the intellectual and aesthetic life of his time, can hardly be questioned.
He was the most brilliant conversationalist, and his Lectures on Shakespeare, remain among the
most important statements in literary criticism.
training perfectly suited to the accomplishment of this task. In the first place he had acquired a
profound knowledge of history by his copious reading since his earliest youth. He had the zest of
the story-teller, and a natural heartiness which made him love life in all its manifestations. He
had an innate sense of the picturesque, developed by his passion for antiquarianism. His
conservative temper which turned him away from the contemporary revolutionary enthusiasm,
gave him a natural sympathy for the days of chivalry. In the Romantic age, Scott was romantic
only in his love of the picturesque and his interest in the Middle Ages.

Scott was the first novelist in Europe who made the scene an essential element in action.
He knew Scotland, and loved it, and there is hardly an event in any of his Scottish novels in
which we do not breathe the very atmosphere of the place, and feel the presence of its moors and
mountains. He chooses the place so well and describes it so perfectly, that the action seems
almost to be result of natural environment.

Though the style of Scott is often inartistic, heavy and dragging; the love interest in his
novels is apt to be insipid and monotonous; he often sketches a character roughly and plunges
him into the midst of stirring incidents; and he has no inclinations for tracing the logical
consequences of human action—all these objections and criticisms are swept away in the end by
the broad, powerful current of his narrative genius. Moreover, Scott’s chief claim to greatness
lies in the fact that he was the first novelist to recreate the past in such a manner that the men and
women of the bygone ages, and the old scenes became actually living, and throbbing with life.
Carlyle very pertinently remarked about Scott’s novels: “These historical novels have taught this
truth unknown to the writers of history, that the bygone ages of the world were actually filled by
living men, not by protocols, state papers, controversies, and abstractions of men.”

1.8 Summary of the Age of Romanticism

This period extends from the war with the colonies, following the Declaration of
Independence in 1776 to the accession of Victoria in 1837. During the first part of the period
especially, England was in a continual turmoil, produced by political and economic agitation at
home, and by the long wars that covered two continents and the wide sea between them. The
mighty changes resulting from these two causes have given this period the name of the Age of
Revolution. The storm center of all the turmoil in England and abroad was the French
Revolution, which had a profound influence on the life and literature of all Europe. On the
Continent the overthrow of Napoleon at Waterloo (1815) apparently checked the progress of
liberty, which had started with the French Revolution, but in England the case was reversed. The
agitation for popular liberty, which at one time threatened a revolution, went steadily forward till
it resulted in the final triumph of democracy, in the Reform Bill of 1832, and in a number of
exceedingly important reforms, such as the extension of manhood suffrage, the removal of the
last unjust restrictions against Catholics, the establishment of a national system of schools,
followed by a rapid increase in popular education, and the abolition of slavery in all English
colonies (1833). To this added the changes produced by the discovery of steam and the invention
of machinery, which rapidly changed England from an agricultural to a manufacturing nation,
introduced the factory system, and caused this period to be known as the Age of Industrial
Revolution.

In the most basic sense, Romanticism, which is loosely identified as spanning the years
of 1783-1830, can be distinguished from the preceding period called the Enlightenment by
observing that the one elevated the role of spirit, soul, instinct, and emotion, while the other
advocated a cool, detached scientific approach to most human endeavors and dilemmas. In short,
Romanticism in literature was a rejection of many of the values movements such as the
Enlightenment and Scientific Revolution held as paramount.

Romanticism, initiated by the English poets such as Coleridge and Wordsworth, as well
as Blake, Keats, Shelley, was concentrated primarily in the creative expressions of literature and
the arts; however, the philosophy and sentiment characteristic of the Romanticism movement
would spread throughout Europe and would ultimately impact not only the arts and humanities,
but the society at large, permanently changing the ways in which human emotions, relationships,
and institutions were viewed, understood, and artistically and otherwise reflected.

The Enlightenment was the name given to the period that preceded the Romantic Age,
and it is in understanding the key features of the Enlightenment that one can best understand how
the characteristics of Romanticism came to be, and how they differed so radically from those of
the industrialized era. The Enlightenment had developed and championed logic and reason above
all other qualities and there was little room in this worldview for the emotion-based nature that
would define Romanticism. According the Enlightenment view, people and their relationships,
roles, institutions, and indeed, their whole societies, could be understood best if organized and
approached with a scientific perspective.

During this time in the history of the romanticism movement in literature, it was believed
that objectivity was not only desirable, but also achievable. Subjective emotions, contemplation
of nature, and the creative impulse felt by individuals were all of far lesser importance than
building the physical and commercial infrastructure of a country that had new resources,
techniques, and capital with which to experiment. The literary products of the period reflected
the priorities and values of the time, focusing mainly on political and economic themes.
Philosophical writings similarly reflected the mechanistic preoccupations of the age and dealt
more so than ever with the individual human experience as well as personal thoughts.

Romanticism, then, emerged as a reaction against what was perceived to be a cultural

climate that had been lacking in spontaneity, creativity, and individuality. Indeed, some of the
earliest and most profound writings of the Romantic period were not the poems themselves, but
manifestos and discourses on the nature of human beings and creative expression, such as
Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria, Shelley’s A Defence of Poetry, and Wordsworth’s Preface to
Lyrical Ballads. In these three exemplary prose pieces, the Romantic poets promote their vision
of what poetry, and by extension, society, should be. Their vision was quite distinct from that of
the Enlightenment, and in these pieces, the major characteristics of Romanticism were developed
and disseminated. One of these characteristics, as articulated by Wordsworth in the Preface was
the belief that “ordinary things [were worth writing about] and should be presented to the mind
in an unusual way”. The Romantics believed that through close attention, the most ordinary,
quotidian objects, emotions, and experiences could be elevated to the extraordinary.

Another characteristic of Romanticism, as expressed by Shelley in his Defence, was the

belief that emotions and relationships were not just important, but were the very currency of life.
Rather than functioning as a cog in a wheel, mechanically and unaware of the other parts
comprising the whole machine, Shelley argued that: The great secret of mortals is love…and an
identification of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought, action, or person, not our
own. A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put
himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must
become his own. While some of the Romantics were more inwardly focused than the kind of
engagement that Shelley called for so passionately in his Defence, they tended to agree on the
major characteristics of Romanticism: the valuation of intensely felt emotion, the importance of
creative expression, and the possibility of transcending ordinary experience, which was referred
to as achieving a state of sublimity.

Romanticism was, above all, an experimental project of self and social quest, a quest for
intense experiences that were felt deeply, a quest for connection, a quest for transcendence, and a
quest to know the self—and, by extension, others—more profoundly. The quest did not occur,
nor could it have occurred, by creating a plan to achieve it. Rather, it was through constant
observation and alertness, and the devotion of attention to the most minute and seemingly
unimportant details of daily life, that the self, and therefore society, had the possibility of
transmuting itself into something greater. Bloom and Trilling refer to Romanticism as a “health-
restoring revival of the instinctual life”. Rather than trust in machines, industry, and
scientifically-based progress, Romanticism encouraged people to look inward, trusting
themselves and their own intuition. Romantics also directed their own and others’ attention to
nature, where all organic processes could be observed, celebrated, and from which lessons could
be learned. Through these shifts in focus, the Romantics argued, it would become possible for
people to know themselves and the world better and more fully.

Whereas the preceding age of Enlightenment had promised that reason, logic, and
scientific processes would lead to knowledge, success, and a better society, the Romantics
challenged that notion, and changed the equation. It was no longer necessary to follow traditional
formulae; rather, new literary forms and new modes of expression could be created. “The major
Romantic questers,” write Bloom and Trilling, offered through their own examples the
possibility of “engage[ing] in the extraordinary enterprise of seeking to re-beget their own selves,
as though through the imagination a man might hope to become his own father, or at least his
own heroic precursor”. Perhaps Romanticism was adopted so quickly and on such a widespread
scale across Europe and then, not long after, to America, because it was an antidote to the hyper-
accelerated period of change that the Industrial Revolutions had ushered in during the previous
epoch. Given that the Industrial Revolution had caused such dramatic shifts in all aspects of
society, changing the ways that people thought, felt, worked, and related with one another, it
would not be unreasonable to hypothesize that such a shift in paradigm and in practice created a
sort of cognitive dissonance. Such dissonance might only have been possible to resolve by
embracing the backlash that Romanticism represented to the Enlightenment ideas and ideals.
Whereas the Enlightenment could be interpreted as having drained the creativity and spontaneity
out of life, making tasks and relationships predictable through mechanization, Romanticism
offered the hope of restoration through small and unexpected pleasures. Romanticism invited
people to dream again, to imagine, to give in to flights of fancy, to explore the border between
conscious experience and unconscious dreams and desires.

These ideals of Romanticism, first articulated by the English poets, spread to other
artistic genres, including music and the visual arts, as well as to other countries. For those
countries which had not yet coalesced in terms of their own national identity, the Romanticism
offered a creative framework for defining and expressing what was unique to that region, for
Romanticism was inherently creative and imaginative, inviting its adherents to envision
possibilities that might never have been entertained before. As a result, the value of the
individual, of the arts, and of emotional expression, was able to regain a place in thought and
practice, tempering the logic-bound tendencies of science with the shifting philosophies of
emotion. As Bloom and Trilling observe, the contributions of the Romantics remain valuable and
relevant in contemporary life. Perhaps, they write, “romanticism is…endemic in human nature,”
for “all men and women are questers to some degree.”

Sources/Suggested Reading

1. A Short History of English Literature by Ifor Evans

2. English Literature: Its History and Significance by William J Long

3. History of English Literature by Edward Albert